World's Last Communist

2012

"The problem of Communism," writes Lucian Boia, "was that in the natural order of things, it could not function. It was conceived and put into practice in defiance of elementary human and social laws. How could a system function without property, without competition and without sufficient individual motivation? Perhaps only be creating a 'new man', as was indeed the intention. Communism was kept alive by artificial means (tolerating a variable sector of private property and free commerce), and its survival was due to a great extent to the inflow of Western credit and assistance. The real miracle was not the collapse of Communism but the fact that it was able to go on so long!" 1 Jean-Francois Revel wrote in 1985: "The Soviet Union… is undoubtedly sick, very sick. It will die, that's certain,… because it is in and of itself a society of and for death. But the prime question of our time is which of the two events will take place first: the destruction of democracy by communism or communism's death of its own sickness?…" 2 Indeed, a superficial view of the situation would have confirmed Revel's judgement that the West would collapse before the Soviet Union. As John Darwin writes, "In the mid-1980s the scope of Soviet ambition seemed greater than ever. From a forward base at Camranh Bay in southern Vietnam, the Soviet navy could make its presence felt across the main sea lanes running through South East Asia and in the Indian Ocean, a 'British lake' until the 1950s. By laying down huge new aircraft carriers like the Leonid Brezhnev, Moscow now aimed to rival the Americans' capacity to intervene around the globe. But then in less than half a decade this vast imperial structure -the ruling power across Northern Eurasia, the tenacious rival in Southern Asia, Africa and the Middle East -simply fell to pieces. By 1991 it was an empire in ruins. There was no 'silver age' or phase of decline: just a calamitous fall…" 3 This epochal change was made possible by the one institution in the state that understood what was happening -the KGB, which backed the one man in the Politburo who was willing and able to change things -Gorbachev. As Norman Stone writes, the KGB, unlike almost everybody else, "knew how far things had gone wrong, and, with a view to shaking up the old men, saw that a degree of public criticism and respect for law would be helpful, quite apart from the good impression to be made abroad. The Party and the KGB had had a host-parasite relationship… Now the parasite was given responsibility." 4

Republics of Letters. Vol. 1, No. 1 (2009).

Russia in global affairs, 2021

From the standpoint of world history, the collapse of the Soviet Union is unremarkable. That this event took the world by surprise suggests that political analysts, their attention focused on current affairs, can overlook underlying trends and countertrends that eventually make even dramatic events seem secondary. When trends and countertrends are in equilibrium, they generate an illusion of stability. But in the long run, the possibility of disequilibrium approaches certainty and the result is discontinuity. The Soviet Union's inherent predisposition towards collapse is implicit in the word "union," which is partly an acknowledgement of plurality and partly, wishful thinking. The same can be said of the United States of America, perpetually buffeted by centrifugal forces that will in time generate its own collapse. These political entities had existed, or were imagined to exist, even as their identifying characteristics changed, but each of which eventually disappeared as a consequence of external conquest of internal dissolution. Sometimes a vanished kingdom reappears, as did the constituent states including Russia itself after the implosion of the Soviet Union. But what is the "kingdom" we are speaking of in the context of Russian affairs? Is it Russia? Or the Soviet Union? Is it a state? A regime? A nation or an empire? A society or civilization? These words identify constructed historical terry nardin Professor of Political Science and Director of the Common Curriculum at Yale-NUS College, Singapore RUSSIA IN GLOBAL AFFAIRS 60 thirty years after No End to History identities, not natural ones. All are to some degree arbitrary, chosen and defined according to purpose. We cannot say, independent of that purpose and its context, what characteristics distinguish Russia as a historical entity from other such entities or even from its environment. Historical entities persist despite changes in their characteristics and boundaries, but all are in the long run impermanent. It is therefore impossible to say which is more durable. Nations, understood as linguistic or ethnic entities, can outlast empires. But sometimes they do not because they have been absorbed, suppressed, or eliminated. Confederations are made and then unmade. The word "civilization" may imply persistence, but what persists is vague and contested. Students of foreign policy are not historians. They are concerned with assessing the significance of current events. In relation to Russia, these include ongoing Russian maneuvers in the near abroad; the slow unravelling of the European Union following its expansion into the former Soviet space and then its contraction with Brexit; the attempted revival of American global leadership after Trump's electoral loss and abortive insurrection; and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sometimes their concerns expand to include a longer-term trend such as the rise of China or the emergence of social media. Technological innovations, epidemics and migrations have been important in human affairs for millennia, but assessing their effects is usually left to historians. Policy analysts focus on how we can take advantage of such changes. They may occasionally contemplate regime change but seldom the complete disappearance of countries or civilizations. If we count back from the official date of the Soviet Union's disbandment in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha in 1991 as many years as have passed since then to the present day, we will find ourselves at the beginning of the 1960s, when the international order that changed in the early 1990s was just being established. Remarkably, in the middle of that period, in 1975, the final documents of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe were signed. In a sense, that

This paper delves into the true causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which completely surprised virtually all geopolitical pundits and analysts of the day. The paper then approaches what understanding these causes and their consequences can mean for the present and future of geopolitics.

Princeton University Press, 2006

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek: "Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes) Abstract: Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

International Affairs, 1999

Rethinking the Soviet collapse: Sovietology, the death of communism and the new Russia. Edited by Michael Cox. London: Pinter. . pp. Index. £..     . Pb.: £..    . Michael Cox establishes the rationale for this book in the introduction. He has set himself the task of editing a work that engages in a serious retrospective analysis of the failure of Soviet studies to anticipate the fall of the USSR. He argues that this is necessary because in order to understand what is going on in Russia today we must understand where our intellectual predecessors (or at least many of them) went wrong. The key question is why was the rapid and relatively peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union such a shock to the group of academics known as ' Sovietologists'? Cox argues in his opening chapter that the fall of the USSR did not so much challenge their assumptions but bury Soviet studies as a discipline. Few practising Sovietologists actually foresaw the possibility of the Soviet period coming to an end and, in Cox's words, 'the scale of the failure should not be underestimated'. He begins the book by trying to understand why the discipline was unsuccessful in anticipating the implosion of an entity that it had been studying for over forty years. So far, so provocative. Cox situates this failure not just in the nature of Soviet studies but with the position of the academic in the modern university. Specifically, he argues that there were three reasons which determined the failure of academics working in the Soviet studies field. The first pillar of his argument is that, on the whole, academics are trained to look at the small picture; academic work was therefore narrow and highly specialized. Cox's second point is that there was a dislike of futurology which in turn led to a disdain for prediction and a preference for studying the world as it was rather than as it might be. His third point is a more general one, which is that most social scientists are better at dealing with stable structures than with radical change. Perhaps, though, as Cox points out, the most important factor determining the nature of Soviet studies was the acceptance that the USSR would continue to be: an assumption on the whole unchallenged and strengthened by the

2007

Abstract: My paper today will consider the case of Russia in the early 1990s in order to disentangle a less local phenomenon that Judith Halberstam has called the “insidious linking of perverse modernity and the perverse body in certain instantiations of globalized thinking.”1 How do ...

The Irish Examiner , 2021

Newspaper article on the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the USSR